Licenses API

The Open Definition states: “A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike.”

Data on more than 100 open licenses

Including all OSI-approved open source licenses and all Open Definition conformant open data and content licenses. Provided in easy to use, machine readable JSON -- perfect if you need to drop a license chooser into your app.

View the licenses available

License Groups

In addition various generic groups are provided that are useful when constructing license choice lists, including non-commercial options, generic Public Domain and more. Pre-packaged groups include:

All licensesOSI compliantOpen Definition compliantSpecially selected set developed for CKAN that is perfect for data and content site license choosers.

Format

JSON hashes with the following keys:

{ "id": "ODC-BY-1.0", "domain_content": false, "domain_data": true, "domain_software": false, "od_conformance": "approved", "osd_conformance": "not reviewed", "status": "active", "title": "Open Data Commons Attribution License 1.0", "url": "https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by" } <code> Spot an error, think we should have more info? Please file an issue or submit a patch. ===== How do I use it? ===== ==== Get the data ==== Download the licenses, either all in one, individually (see below) or in specific groups (see above). For example, here's how to use curl to access an individual license: curl [[https://licenses.opendefinition.org/licenses/ODC-BY-1.0.json]] And here's how to use curl to access the CKAN license group: curl [[https://licenses.opendefinition.org/licenses/groups/ckan.json]] ==== Git Access ==== You can also get the material as a git repo: git clone [[https://github.com/okfn/licenses]] Javascript Access (JSONP) We also provide a simple way to get direct access from javascript in the browser using JSONP, by providing versions of the all of the data in the jsonp subdirectory wrapped in a callback function named <code> license_callback

Thus, the JSONP version of a file named:

xyz.json

whether it is a license group or an individual license, will be located at:

licenses/jsonp/xyz.json

For example from jQuery:

$.ajax({ url:'https://licenses.opendefinition.org/groups/jsonp/ODC-BY-1.0.js', dataType: 'jsonp', // you *must* set the callback function to be license_callback jsonpCallback: 'license_callback', success: function(data) { console.log('License title is ' + data.title); } });

Because our JSONP data is served from a static files, it has a hardcoded callback function and therefore must name your callback function for the JSONP request

license_callback